


To Run Into the Middle of the Room

by dear_tiger



Series: The Witch Is Dead [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-21 06:27:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a timestamp to "The Witch Is Dead", in which they are in San Juan, PR, there is a hooker and a bad moment of eye contact, and Dean wonders if the love spell has finally caught up with him. Takes place between chapters 2 and 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Run Into the Middle of the Room

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the nonnie who was disappointed by the lack of shippy feelings in "The Witch Is Dead". No beta, sorry.

The first time Sarah’s spell broke the surface, Dean bit his hand so hard he almost broke the skin. He walked around with two opposing crescents of bruises for days afterward – purple on the edges and yellow in between – and looking at them gave him a sick feeling. The first time wasn’t, honestly, the first, but it was the first time he looked this thing straight in the eye and acknowledged it, as the blood pooled in the crushed soft tissues of his hand.

Fuck knows about love. Dean had a head-spinning fit of infatuation with Cassie to compare this to, and what he felt for Sam was nothing like. Ridiculous, really – not knowing if you were in love with somebody or just loved the guy to death. But want he acknowledged that one time for the first time, in San Juan, Puerto Rico of all places. 

The Puerto Rico part mattered. It required air travel, and air travel was not good for Dean’s mental health.

San Juan in December made Dean feel like he was drowning in warm bathwater. The air sat heavy in his chest and clang to his skin. Sitting in the cab, still on edge after the flight, Dean drifted off for a second or two and imagined that Puerto Rico was giving him a huge sloppy kiss right on the mouth. All that water, all that Caribbean spit. He was still wound up and itching under his shirt – under his skin and in his bones – when the cab pulled up in front of Mike Dawson’s hotel, some ridiculous thing right out of a travel magazine. The place was all marble arches and flowers, with a ten-foot tall birdcage in the lobby, full of something exotic and colorful that Dean couldn’t be bothered with but that Sam took an interest in, stretched his neck out toward it like he was a bird himself. There were palm trees silhouetted against the night sky and a shiny coin of a nearly full moon stuck in their branches, perfect like it was hung there on purpose. 

Mike Dawson was someone whose daughter they saved a couple of years back; whose wife they were too late for. He had since moved to the Caribbean and opened a hotel there, and then the old nightmare started again: his daughter became lethargic during the day, walked around with unexplained blisters on her feet, cried at bedtime and complained that something huge and pale looked into her bedroom windows at night. Sam and Dean would’ve come back to pick up their slack anyway, but Mike was also offering to pay cash. A lot of cash. And dammit, Dean wasn’t going to chicken out because of an airplane. 

The manager was beautiful, brown skin and tightly coiled hair and a coral red blouse under her dark suit. She told them the owner was out but he’ll be back in the morning, and would they like to see their rooms? One room, Sam said, please. It’s a work thing. She didn’t even lift an eyebrow, just smiled and punched a few keys. 

Walking through San Juan was like being in one of those Korean baths. Hot and steamy, then cold, then hot again. Out of the cool lobby they went out into the warm, humid night to walk to their room, declining a ride in a golf cart. A wind rose and stirred the palm trees and brought with it the smell of lilies. Sam hunched his shoulders, shifting his bag. 

Dean had been teasing a hole in his jeans as he walked, almost unconsciously. “Hey, Sam, you think we’ll get thrown out by security before Mike gets here?”

Sam grinned at him in the dark, and the moonlight caught on his teeth and in his eyes. That wasn’t the moment the spell surfaced, but Dean felt something then, just a familiar stirring that was one degree too intense. Sam said, “That one is looking at you funny.”

Dean saluted the guard, who nodded and smiled and went on his way. 

The place Mike Dawson was running was some sort of a golf resort. Maybe. Dean didn’t research the hotel since their hunt had clearly followed the man from Minnesota. Now that they were here and had a chance to look around, Dean was wishing Mike had put them up in a local roach motel. They wouldn’t have stood out as much. But the room Dean had no objections to. No one could see them in the room. He had zero problems with the air conditioning, or the cool tile floors, or the enormous bathtub, or the soft beds. 

Dean called the first shower, and while he was there, Sam had gone out. Dean was still feeling off center after the flight and Sam wasn’t there to shoot the shit with him, so he looked around for distraction. There was TV, of course. There was also the book Sam brought with him, Rudyard Kipling’s _Jungle Book_. Dean flipped it open on a random page and read the first paragraph out loud, hating the sound of the empty room that not even the TV was filling.

“Chuchundra is a broken-hearted little beast.” He paused and repeated, liking the words, “a broken-hearted little beast. He whimpers and cheeps all night, trying to make up his mind to run into the middle of the room, but he never gets there.” 

So what was there, in the middle of the dark room?

He never found out because that was when Sam returned. And being an awesome and sometimes amazingly perceptive little brother, Sam brought with him a hooker. 

Dean’s jaw may or may not have dropped. “Hey, baby,” said the woman. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with all the right curves. “You friend here tells me you need someone to help you relax.”

“Wow,” Dean said. “Really?”

Sam smacked him on the shoulder, stole his lighter and his cigarettes and went out on the balcony. So maybe they had some boundary issues. It wasn’t like Sam was going to watch. Dean wasn’t thinking then of Sarah’s spell, but he wasn’t thinking about it most of the time. 

Later, stripped naked and with the shower water cooling on the back of his neck, with the satin sheets under his ass and a woman’s hot mouth around his dick, Dean just had to take one look. Sam stood with his back to the room, leaning onto the railing. His head was turned just enough for Dean to see the tip of his nose and the corner of his eye, the way moonlight touched his cheek. The woman licked and sucked him, sending off shivers deep within his body that ran up his spine, pleasure radiating like waves up his chest and across his shoulders, until his fingertips were tingling. Dean dropped his head back and really soaked in the feeling – the heat of her mouth, the smoothness of her cheek, the barely-there scratch of her nails on his thighs that he liked. He stole another look. He felt like a dam was starting to crack inside of him, and high as he was, he didn’t worry much about it. He saw Sam just standing there, parting his lips to let the smoke drift out. He lifted a foot to scratch the back of his calf, and Dean saw a stump of missing little toe there, long-healed and long-familiar, and the sight of it went straight to his chest. 

_Christ, Winchester,_ he told himself, thinking of those guys out there with weird kinks. Like amputations. Dean wasn’t usually the one for the extreme edge of weird, but there was something about Sam’s foot – a large foot with a dirty sole – that was drawing him in like a tide tonight. 

Sam liked leather belts, chains and handcuffs. Dean felt something jump inside of him at the thought. Kinda hard to live with the guy and not know a dirty little secret or two. Dean bit his lip. Fucking San Juan and all the weird it was apparently bringing out in him tonight! He was breathing faster now, seeing colored spots swim in front of his eyes when he squeezed them shut, and the spots resembled the shape of Sam’s shoulders, the afterimage of the side of his face.

_Look at me,_ Dean thought, almost over the edge. He stared until he was sure Sam must’ve felt it between his shoulder blades. _Look at me, Sam._ He could see tension there, in Sam’s back and neck, like he was struggling to keep staring out into the night.

_Look at me, Sam. Sammy. Sammich. Look. At. Me._

Somewhere deep down in Dean’s heart, somewhere in the total darkness of blood-filled chambers, in the metaphorical space from where love and fear comes – somewhere in there lived a muskrat. He crept along the walls all night, every night since the New Year’s Eve of 1988, wanting to run into the middle of the room but unable to do it. There were things in the middle of the dark room that was Dean Winchester’s heart. 

Dean thought, _Oh fuck, Sam,_ and just then Sam turned his head and they locked eyes for a second. Dean came hard and bit his hand, nearly drawing blood, which had nothing to do with the orgasm. 

The next day and the day after and the day after that Dean felt like he was burning up in his skin, waiting for the spell to finally take root and turn him into a lustful cockmonster. As the crescents of the bite bruise on his hand waxed and blended into a yellow moon, he thought about the dark room. There was no spell there, no witches with their arms reaching out for him, no horrible chain that would bind him against his will. Dean ran into the center of the room one night, and there he found Sam who looked back at him with the same thought in his eyes. Only the witch never touched Sam.


End file.
